Chris Cosentino—An ‘Offally’ Good Chef

For
the past 10 years, Incanto restaurant on Church Street
has provided a warm and often sizzling environment for
the creations of Chef Chris Cosentino.
Photo by Corrie M. Anders

Chris Cosentino has guts. Both
literally and figuratively.

Noe Valley’s most daring chef
recently took his love for all things offal to a national
television audience and returned home with the top prize in a
reality cooking competition.

Cosentino, executive chef at
Incanto Italian restaurant on Church Street, needed only two
words to describe his triumph in the just completed Season
Four of Bravo TV’s Top Chef Masters.

“Guts prevail.”

The catchy slogan sums up his
culinary philosophy, says the 40-year-old celebrity as he
reflects on his latest adventure. He is sitting in the front
section of Incanto, surrounded by empty tables and upturned
chairs, on a Wednesday in October, hours before the dinner
crowd arrives.

For someone who is constantly
taste-testing, cooking, and entertaining, Cosentino shows only
the slightest hint of a paunch. He looks like the foodie rock
star he is, sporting a circle beard, a small gold hoop in each
earlobe, heavy-framed black glasses, and arms coated with
tattoos. The tats include 13 gold stars circling a ship’s
anchor that’s the state flag of his native Rhode Island, a
butcher’s diagram of a hog, and a set of utensils—knife, fork,
and spoon.

After competing on three cooking
shows in the ’00s—Iron Chef America (2007), The
Next Iron Chef (2007), and Chefs
vs. City (2009)—Cosentino says he swore off reality
TV for a while. But this summer, Bravo offered him a
high-profile stage on which he could display his kitchen
artistry while winning money for the Michael J. Fox
Foundation, a charity that seeks a cure for Parkinson’s
disease.

Cosentino is all too familiar
with the crippling neurological disorder. He had an uncle who
suffered from Parkinson’s for 30 years, and died from
complications not too long ago. The mother of a friend has
Parkinson’s, as does one of his mentors, says Cosentino.

Top Chef Masters “was a chance for me to
stretch my neck out pretty far for something I believe in,”
says Cosentino.

The Playmate Challenge

And stretch he did, by creating
a remarkable variety of dishes, many featuring organ meats.

Among the plates he served
during the 10-week competition were a pork-and-chicken-liver
p‰té with hazelnuts and truffles; seared foie gras in a
fig-rose-champagne sauce; and prawns with sautéed celery,
thyme, pine nuts, and chili threads.

Cosentino says the aim of the
contest was to put cooks “in uncomfortable situations to see
how you’d handle it,’’ such as outdoor grilling on a rainy day
with a grill that failed to work.

His most frustrating challenge
came in Episode 5, when he had to please a pretentious Playboy
Bunny.

“There was one Playmate and a
bunch of her drunk friends,” says Cosentino, still mildly
irritated, and he needed to make “a light, diet meal for the
Playboy Bunny” and some “greasy foods” for the others.

The hors d’oeuvre he crafted was
a tataki-style canapé of tuna bacon—with compressed
watermelon, pistachios, and cherry tomatoes—that he
hickory-smoked and seared.

That one sealed his victory, and
he was crowned Top Chef Master for 2012. Cosentino’s
accumulated winnings—$141,000—were donated to the Fox
foundation.

Skilled Head-to-Tail

Still, it took a bit of audacity
for Cosentino to prepare meals that demonstrated his
endorsement of “whole animal” eating—consuming the entrails of
cattle, sheep, pigs, and barnyard fowl.

Until the last decade or so, the
rural South has been the only place in the country to embrace
pickled pig’s feet, chitterlings, hog maws, haggis, and other
cheap offal cuts—food “the rest of the world didn’t take a
liking to.”

But “times have changed,” says
Cosentino, and largely thanks to him, head-to-tail eating is
back in style.

“What you’re seeing is a
rejuvenation of understanding peasant foods—and you’re seeing
a lot of people wanting to know where their meat comes from,”
he says.

Other chefs have taken notice,
and are too broadening their horizons. “Anybody can grill a
piece of beef and put a little salt and pepper on it and call
it a day,” says Cosentino, “but to learn to cook some of those
tougher cuts of meat or work with some of those off cuts
people aren’t used to takes quite a bit of work. That’s a
­really special skill.”

A Kitchen in Naples

A bit of haughtiness can
sometimes slip through Cosentino’s otherwise gracious
demeanor. But he’s as soft as warm butter when he talks about
growing up in the presence of Rosalie Cosentino, his
great-grandmother from Naples, who’s nowdeceased.

She made dandelion wine,
hand-cranked her own pasta, grew tomatoes in coffee cans to
make sauces, kept indoor window boxes filled with oregano,
basil, and parsley, and preserved vegetables from her backyard
garden.

“She used to cook tripe [cow’s
stomach] and I used to remember the horrific smell. I hated
it,” says Cosentino.

But he also hung around in her
kitchen and watched what she did. “That’s a very cool way to
be around as a kid. And I think that really opened my eyes and
gave me insight into something I didn’t really understand.

“It makes sense now,” he says.
“It’s a really big part of what I am now.”

Rising to the Top

Cosentino is an enthusiastic
student and collector of cookbooks, and today owns a library
of 1,500 titles. But he admits he wasn’t much of a scholar in
his youth. He graduated from high school in 1990 “barely, by
the skin of my teeth,” and was conditionally accepted into his
alma mater, Johnson & Wales University in Providence, R.I.

Once he found his way to San
Francisco in 1996, the rising chef sharpened his talents in
the Bay Area kitchens of Alice Walters and Francis Ford
Coppola, and served as a consulting chef for Michael Minna’s
Aqua Group. Then 10 years ago, Incanto owner Mark Pastore
selected Cosentino as the executive chef for his new
restaurant, located on the former site of Speckmann’s German
Restaurant.

It wasn’t long before Pastore
knew he had a star. “I’ve watched for years as Chris has
poured his heart and soul into food he believes in,” says
Pastore. “We succeeded on our own terms. We’re not making
pizza or meatballs that people understand and love. We’re
challenging peo­ple to eat something they don’t know. It’s
challenging, but most rewarding.”

Clothes, Cutlery and Comics

Cosentino expresses some
ambivalence about his chosen path. “You have a direction and
you set out to do something in life. That’s the goal,” he
says. “But you don’t really know what’s going to happen. Some
days it works. Some days it ­doesn’t.”

But the indefatigable innovator
seems to have everything working these days. In the last two
years alone, he has co-founded the Boccalone Salumeria shop at
the Ferry Building, opened a pork-oriented restaurant in Los
Angeles aptly named “Pigg,” created a line of men’s pants, and
designed a sold-out line of footwear for Mozo Shoes.

Last May, he published his first
cookbook,Beginnings: My Way to Start a Meal” (Williams-Sonoma),
and even found time to sign up for another reality cooking
show, Time Machine Chefs, which aired in August.

In the next few weeks, Marvel
Comics will release aWolverine superhero comic
that Cosentino wrote, and the chef’s imprint will be on a new
four-knife collection from Shun Cutlery. And he’s putting the
finishing touches on a new line of shoes that will launch next
spring.

As for Incanto, the restaurant
is doing well, says Cosentino. It draws diners from around the
city, along with a host of Noe Valley regulars. “We have some
people from the neighborhood who eat here at least twice a
week,” he says.

The menu changes frequently. A
recent one offered entrees such as scallops with cauliflower
and lardo; beef breast with lobster mushrooms and snails; lamb
cooked in a cocoon of hay; and pork chop with heirloom apples,
turnips, roasted shallots, and feather kale.

And there were vegetarian
dishes, too.

“We always have vegetarian
options on the menu. [But] in some ways I feel like I
shouldn’t have to,” Cosentino says, “because when you go to a
vegetarian restaurant, they sure don’t have a meat option for
anybody who eats meat.”

Tracks of Foie Gras

Incanto no longer sends foie
gras out of its kitchen, however, and the restaurant is
complying with a new state law that bans the sale of products
made from duck and goose livers. During the food industry’s
long debate with animal rights activists who felt the forced
feeding of poultry to enlarge their livers was abusive,
Cosentino’s defense of foie gras resulted in some nasty
middle-of-the-night calls and anonymous threats.

“I don’t pay attention” now, he
says. “What comes in gets handed over to the FBI.”

Cosentino, who lives in the
Inner Sunset with his wife Tatiana and their 7-year-old son
Easton, rarely dines in Noe Valley or spends time in the
neighborhood.

“I don’t live here. When I’m not
at work, I don’t want to be in Noe Valley,” says the chef,
whose 8:30 a.m. shift often ends after midnight. “Nothing
personal, but there’s no reason for me to come here. I’m here
so much that it’s nice to get away.”

He does his produce shopping on
weekends at the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market. While Noe Valley
has one of the city’s “really great farmers markets,” he says,
he already has a 15-year relationship with his Ferry Building
growers, and he buys his meats directly from ranchers.

Cosentino says he’d love to make
more time for his other passions—endurance bicycle racing,
skiing, and traveling. And he wouldn’t pass up the chance to
host his own television show.

All would generate an atmosphere
that could inspire new culinary creations.

“Everything creates a thought
process,” he says, “and I think that’s what is really
fun.”

APUMPKIN
PRIMO

Chris Cosentino offers this
savory recipe from Beginnings: My Way to Start a
Meal (Williams-Sonoma, 2012). The cookbook, his first,
contains more than 60 recipes for Italian-style first
courses, some of which you may have sampled at Incanto
restaurant. The cookbook is available at Omnivore Books on
Food, 3885 Cesar Chavez St.

Pumpkin, Pumpkin Seeds &
Pickled Cranberries

The flavor of this simple
combination of sweet, creamy pumpkin, tart picked cranberries,
and bitter mustard greens are the essence of fall. To
intensify the pumpkin flavor, I used toasted seeds and pumpkin
seed oil. This dish would be a great first course for
Thanksgiving or a good accompaniment to roasted game birds.

—Chris Cosentino

PICKLED
CRANBERRIES

1 pound (500 g) cranberries

2 tablespoons yellow mustard
seeds

Kosher salt

2 cups (16 fl oz/500 ml) cider
vinegar

2 cups (14 oz/440 g) firmly
packed brown sugar

1 bay leaf

1 fresh sage sprig

2 fresh thyme sprigs

1 teaspoon coriander seeds

1 teaspoon fennel seeds

1 teaspoon black peppercorns

1 Sugar Pie pumpkin, about 1.5
pounds (750 g)

2 tablespoons rendered duck
fat

1/3 cup (1-1/2 oz/45 g)
pumpkin seeds

1/4 cup (1/4 oz/7 g) fresh
sage leaves

2 cups (2 oz /60 g) baby red
mustard greens

Pumpkin seed oil for drizzling

To make the pickled cranberries,
place the berries in a nonreactive container with the mustard
seeds and a pinch of salt. In a saucepan, bring the vinegar,
sugar, bay, sage, thyme, coriander and fennel seeds, and
peppercorns to a boil over high heat. Remove from the heat,
then pour the hot liquids through a fine-mesh sieve over the
cranberries. Discard the solids in the sieve. Place a pot lid
on top of the cranberries, then placed a large sealed plastic
container filled with water on top to keep the berries
submerged. Let the cranberries stand in the liquid until cool.

Meanwhile, halve, seed, and peel
the pumpkin, then cut it into 1-inch (2.5-cm) cubes. Bring a
large saucepan three-fourths full of salted water to a boil
over high heat. Add the pumpkin cubes and cook until tender, 3
to 4 minutes. Drain well and spread the pumpkin cubes on a
rimmed baking sheet. Let cool completely.

In a large sauté pan over high
heat, warm the duck fat. When hot, add the pumpkin cubes and
cook, tossing occasionally, until caramelized, about 4
minutes. Add the pumpkin seeds and sage and sauté until
toasted, about 2 minutes. Fold in the mustard greens and cook
briefly just until wilted and warm.

To serve, remove the plastic
container and lid and warm the cranberries in their pickling
liquid over low heat until warmed through. Divide the
pumpkin-mustard greens mixture among warmed individual bowls
and drizzle each serving with pumpkin seed oil. Use a slotted
spoon to divide the cranberries among the bowls (discard the
pickling liquid) and serve right away.